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WHY IS THE COMPONENTIAL CONSTRUCT OF IMPLICIT LANGUAGE APTITUDE SO DIFFICULT TO CAPTURE?

A COMMENTARY ON THE SPECIAL ISSUE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2021

Pierre Perruchet Open the ORCID record for Pierre Perruchet [Opens in a new window]
Pierre Perruchet*
Affiliation:
Université de Bourgogne
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Pierre Perruchet, LEAD/CNRS, Pole AAFE, Université de Bourgogne, 21000 Dijon, France. E-mail: pierre.perruchet@u-bourgogne.fr
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Abstract

Although this special issue reveals some promising achievements, most of the contributions show that tasks of implicit learning are not or are only weakly correlated with each other, and they have inconsistent predictive power on L2 acquisition. This commentary examines four possible explanations for this surprising pattern: The (suboptimal) selection of tasks, the low reliability of measures, the deep influence of the starting level even for nominally “new” implicit tasks, and the fact that the mastery of L2 may involve other implicit processes than implicit learning measured through laboratory tasks.

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